Following East African cowries: Currency supply, transoceanic exchange, and monetary transformation in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Abstract This article recentres East Africa in the global history of cowrie shells by tracing the trajectories of Monetaria annulus —the East African cowrie species—across interconnected monetary arenas in the nineteenth century. Situating African monetary history within transoceanic processes, it argues that the ‘great cowrie inflation’ in West Africa was closely tied to the reorganization of procurement networks, labour regimes, and commercial infrastructures in the Western Indian Ocean. Viewed from Zanzibar, the massive export of East African cowries emerges as the outcome of intersecting processes: price fluctuations in Maldivian shells, the expansion of the palm oil trade, extractive labour networks, and imperial interests. The article further shows that the same infrastructures were later reoriented toward the Great Lakes region, tracing how a single commodity connected East and West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic world. Following cowries across these overlapping spaces demonstrates that monetary history—wherever it is written—cannot be fully understood without attending to the supply-side infrastructures that made money available.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Global History, 2026 · DOI ↗